“I was so carried away by self-medication that I did without a pathologist at my own autopsy,” one of the Russian comedians joked from the stage.
Unfortunately, many Russians sin by going to the pharmacy and buying medicines instead of visiting a specialist doctor. They prescribe drugs for themselves and treat themselves. However, in this case, the saying “Saving the drowning is the business of the drowning themselves” sounds not only frivolous, but even fatal. And this is evidenced by the rating of the most dangerous anti-cold drugs and treatments.
Self-prescribed antibiotics took the first place in the flu hazard rating. Influenza is a viral infection, and antibiotics only work on bacteria, and not without side effects of all kinds. They are no longer used for influenza, but for bronchitis or pneumonia that has developed in parallel. Illiterate use of potent drugs may well lead to disability, and these are not just words: for example, gentamicin in combination with vancomycin causes irreversible hearing damage, doxycycline is dangerous in the presence of liver problems, and almost all antibiotics are allergic reactions up to anaphylactic shock. Which even within the walls of medical institutions sometimes leads to a sad outcome – what can we say about places to which the ambulance will get through traffic jams or off-road for at least an hour.
In second place is the usual aspirin. In children and adolescents, the use of aspirin during the flu is fraught with the development of Reye’s syndrome: first, nausea and vomiting against the background of impaired consciousness, and then liver damage, cerebral edema, and in a quarter (and in children under five years old and in half) cases – death. Therefore, doctors advise not to use aspirin, especially since paracetamol and ibuprofen can be found on the shelves of pharmacies (but analgin is not worth it, WHO recommended not to use it back in 1991, again because of the risk of severe side effects). By the way, aspirin is also poorly compatible with alcohol in adults: a few glasses of vodka in combination with a pill can provoke gastric bleeding. It should also not be used in the first months of pregnancy due to the risk of congenital disorders in the unborn child.
The third place in the ranking of dangerous drugs was occupied by alcohol rubbing, which at high temperatures can not only increase the removal of heat from the skin, but also provoke vasospasm. This will lead to a decrease in the flow of heat from the internal organs to the periphery – and the result will not be cooling, but overheating, which the child’s body may not be able to withstand. Physical methods of cooling should be left to doctors who know how to use them and know in what dosages and when exactly it is necessary to use drugs that relieve vascular spasm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasospasm.
There are no completely harmless remedies for the flu, but antibiotics, aspirin, and physical cooling methods are quite effective when prescribed by specialists.
But independent experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted research not only among cold medicines. They also made a general rating of the most harmful drugs.
Thalidomide is a sedative prescribed for pregnant women to help them sleep. It turned out that this drug causes developmental disorders (underdevelopment of limbs, deafness, blindness, cleft palate, etc.) in many thousands of children;
Currently, thalidomide is used to treat leprosy, or leprosy, since the drug was found to lower the level of tumor necrosis factor (a biologically active substance that increases inflammation) in the body.
Medicines for obesity. Drugs in this group are constantly withdrawn from the market. Many of them contain amphetamine, which is addictive and bad for the heart. Other drugs contain fenfluramine, which causes the development of such a serious disease as damage to the heart valves, which requires surgery to treat. New drugs, which include dexfluramine-isolipane, contribute to the development of pathological changes in the lungs;
A growth hormone. This drug is touted as a miracle cure for children who are growing poorly or not at all. It was produced in France from the pituitary glands of deceased people, some of whom were infected with the deadly degenerative Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. As a result, in 1984-1986. more than a thousand children, in fact, along with the hormone received an infection from which many of them died. The parents of some of them sued the Institut Pasteur and France Hypophyse, the manufacturers of the hormone, as well as the doctors who prescribed it;
Bayer’s anti-cholesterol drug Lipobay (cerivastatin) was withdrawn from the market due to life-threatening side effects. According to statistics, 52 people died from this drug in the United States alone, and more than a thousand patients had severely affected muscles. The drug also causes impaired renal function. In France, about 20 cases of life-threatening cases have been reported in people who used both cerivastatin and gemfibrozil, cholesterol-lowering drugs. About 6 million people around the world took drugs in a similar combination.
In addition to a large number of harmful drugs, there are a huge number whose effective effects have not been proven. In any case, before going to the pharmacy, you should consult with specialists.
